MUSIC REVIEW : Mehli Mehta Continues Mozart Survey

Still vigorous at 82, Mehli Mehta pushes on as ever, training the next generation of musicians in his American Youth Symphony. But not only is he passing on the word, he continues to enlighten himself, probing ever more deeply into the music he has lived with through the decades.

This season, as elsewhere, the central theme has been Mozart--and at Royce Hall Sunday night, Mehta passed the two-thirds point in his cycle of the six final Mozart symphonies.

Interestingly, Mehta had not played much Mozart with the AYS before this season, feeling that his string sections were not up to the demands of an idiom where there is no place to hide.

He needn’t have worried about this edition, though, for his strings were alert and unified in the Symphony No. 39, if stretched to their limits in the fourth movement. And Mehta’s conception was a gem, weighty in texture yet sufficiently mobile in a central European manner, with deeply searching phrasings in the andante.

In less-lofty matters, pianist Thomas Dickinson displayed just enough freewheeling expression and plenty of physical thunder in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1--and he needed the thunder in order to surmount the mighty noise produced by the AYS. Yet, more impressive than the obvious bombast was Dickinson’s feathery touch in the octaves of the finale, and Mehta’s tight control on the entire structure.

Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 has gained a bit of weight over the years in Mehta’s hands but hasn’t lost its straight-ahead warmth and vigor, particularly in the remarkably spry finale. And while it would be nice if the AYS could manage to play more softly in the opening of the finale, the brass resounds with more splendor and the strings sound more voluptuous in this work than ever.